Oh Father, My Brother: Reflections on Psychoanalysis, Class and Masculinity

ABSTRACT In this paper, I begin by exploring the Freudian and Lacanian theories of masculinity and how they revalorise the role and law of the father and his patriarchal power. I perform a criticism of these theories by using Castoriadis’ emphasis on the importance of brotherly co-operation in the formation of community. I then move on to critically examine how Lacanian theorists have excluded considerations of class in their account of the origins of the Law and its application which prohibits an adequate redressing of social injustice. I conclude by providing a brief account of the life of my father as a working-class man and how I performed a similar exclusion of class oppression from my theoretical and practical considerations as a way of creating distance from him. This account is an attempt to reconnect with a man who was not only my father, but also my ‘brother in suffering’.